Your Personal Experience

What do you see? What do you hear? What are these things?

Right now, you probably see your computer, and your hands are probably close by. maybe your computer is on a desk. What is this image? Does it take up space? is it made of matter?

The electrical signals processed by your brain that constructs an image.. are these electrical pulses the image that you see?

Could we ever find the experience of sight within the brain? Suppose we did, suppose a scientist said "Aha! Here is the location of the experience of sight in the brain!" But whatever he finds, it is not what you experience as sight. By definition, what you experience is experienced by you, and nothing else. if i experience your experience, then it is not your experience, it is mine, and if i find your experience in your brain, and i take it out and put in a jar, then it is in the jar, and not being experienced by you, and not your experience!

So then, your experience is found no where in the universe save by right now, by you, as you experience. For if it WERE found, it wouldn't be your experience!

That's some bad news for any of you empiricists and scientists. it's a completely unobservable phenomenon. Save by you only. Even then, could you tell me what the f@ck it actually is anyway?

But why does this experience actually exist in the first place? if you made a robot that processed light as electrical signals to help it move around, would it experience sight as we do? is it not enough for an organism's brain to process some information and then act accordingly on said info? Why does there need to be a "you" to experience this information as sight? And just what is this image anyway?

Can you tell me these things? Can anyone? What does the enigma itself tell us?

This maybe nonsense for some of you, for others maybe it reeks of pseudo-philosophy. i'm sorry if that's the case for you; i'm only trying to share.

In this physical world we all see things in the same way. Things are what they are, no different for each individual.

reply to post by Abe7Fig


Thank you, I enjoyed reading your post and thanks for sharing.

I will have to read it again (many good questions). But, at first glance, I think you've got something there. First thing that entered my mind, was... I am Consciousness having an Subjective Experience of Itself. And... never mind what others may think of your experience, they have their own. Individual experiences cannot be objectively analyzed or judged in any way by an outside source.

I'll 'see' you later!

I think our reality is what we've been trained to see. Our parents first , than friends and school teachers, bosses, religious leaders.....I think our perception is only what we've been instructed to see.

reply to post by Abe7Fig


As a bit of an epistemological type, I too spend every day wondering if the constructs of our belief systems and perspectives are driven by nature or nurture...After alot of research and study, I can honestly say I know less than ever about my own human brain!

But 'what if' in the future brain implants become so sophisticated it's possible to send imagery and physical feelings from an individual walking in the forest, then a computer receives and translates all those things and send it to people in Matrix like pods who then experience the exact same thing as the person walking in the woods?

Humans can easily be seen as constructed robots who over the course of many centuries came to be what we are today. I liken it to a few billion people writing a computer program and adding to it each generation, copying what the previous generation made to become an increasingly more complex program until at some time the robots who run the program become convinced without a doubt they are something else, whatever that may be like a soul or spirit. Which at that point becomes a real soul or spirit because everyone is convinced of it being something real (and which can be experienced) even though it's not a tangible object.

After a few centuries and billions of lines of codes later (all containing choices/ideas about different subjects), it's almost impossible and extremely time consuming to examine the individual lines of code which brought about a new thought or a reaction to some situation or information and instead it's translated to the imagined self as just a (good or bad) feeling, the cumulative response from thousands of previous ideas.

Um...I'll be honest, I didn't understand very much of that. Still, it was a good post, and made me think of some questions that I would before put off as nothing but silly. Thanks for the post OP.

reply to post by CryptoZoologistMichee


Just read it replacing the word "experience" with "perspective". He's basically saying there's no proof our physical construct of how we see the world is even actually there, and it's true.

Yeah, after you breath on that you have to think everybody is a supercomputer applying their fixed and unique perspective toward the rest of the world and each perspective is one little holographic illusion.....SO WHO SEES THE WHOLE PICTURE????

And that's why I didn't sleep last night

reply to post by Abe7Fig


I don't pretend to know all of the answers to your questions but on the subject of robots I have heard someone on the radio ( a scientist and also theoretical physist I believe was not sure Michicako spelling) saying that if information was downloaded from your brain to microchip and placed into an android wouldn't it not only have the capability of experiencing our feelings and memories and be around alot longer? I'm just saying....